...[And] apart from the issues of human bias and engineering, how will we be able to tell AI is, well, AI?... What is more likely to happen first: that human beings are able to create an artificial mind, or that humans build clever programs that can fool most of us into thinking they're thinking?... Where human beings are concerned, the power of illusion usually arrives first.... When the talking heads and tech journalists and silicon bros discuss "AI assistants" like Siri or Alexa, they don't actually mean AI. They're not talking about virtual minds.... Machines that adopt human mannerisms or echo human behaviors are not artificially intelligent. If aping mankind equaled AI, then there are some really nifty American Girl Doll collections that Elon Musk should look into. At present, sci-fi AI does not exist. Large spreadsheets exist. Predictive text exists. Pattern-seeking algorithms exist. But these are not minds. When I see how easily the public and industry titans project mind-ness on these digital card-tricks, I grow skeptical about our capacity for Turing-style discernment...